Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation

Cabrillo Economic Development Corporation incorporated in 1981 as a separate nonprofit spinoff from the Cabrillo Improvement Association, which eighty-two resident families had formed in 1976 to buy the Saticoy Lemon Association’s thirty-two-acre farm-labor camp for eighty thousand dollars. The housing advocate Rodney Fernandez helped the residents structure the purchase as a California cooperative corporation after the 1969 Santa Clara River flood damaged the cottages and the Lemon Association announced plans to demolish and redevelop the parcel.

The cooperative restructured rent payments into equity contributions so residents built ownership rather than transferring wealth back to the grower who employed them. United Farm Workers organizing through the Ventura County citrus belt gave the residents the institutional structure for the two-year negotiation.

CEDC now holds roughly two thousand farmworker and low-income housing units across Ventura County, including the 148-unit Rancho Sespe Village the corporation built in the 1990s on a portion of the ranch whose residents Rivcom evicted in 1979. The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence recognized Cabrillo Village in 1991. The cooperative corporation still owns the original thirty-two-acre parcel, making Cabrillo Village one of the longest-running farmworker housing cooperatives in the United States.